Tag: Oakland Raiders

I believe the excellent football magazine When Saturday Comes still maintains the traditional exclusion of MK Dons from its season preview.

All other Premier and Football League clubs are allocated a capsule covering their prospects but not the Buckinghamshire club, which was infamously formed in 2004, after businessmen decided that a football club is purely about assets, and not at all about location. As Wimbledon FC withered on the vine in south London, plans to relocate it to Dublin condensed into the not so evocative reality of a 70-mile move north to Milton Keynes. With the new home came a new name and colour scheme and Wimbledon’s alter ego was up and running.

If you’re American, this was business as usual for professional sport. If you’re English, on the other hand, it was unprecedented in living memory, alien to the tribalism that underpins our national game and, perhaps most significantly, it opened a door on laterally-mobile franchises that many football people would rather was welded shut forever.

That was what assured MK Dons of a long and rocky road towards acceptance, as manifested by the When Saturday Comes boycott. It wasn’t a desire for revenge on the innocent football lovers of Milton Keynes, but a dread of normalising the intolerable, lest it become fashionable.

And as much as some Dons’ fans like to characterise grudging tolerance of their club as the last lingering rant of old men in end-of-world sandwich boards, the case against ‘Franchise FC’ and its lamentable origins were only given a fresh lick of paint by this week’s goings-on in the United States.

A vote by NFL owners last week means that Las Vegas will have a new American football team in 2019. Only it won’t.

That’s because Las Vegas is getting Oakland’s team. Not because fans of the Oakland Raiders have found that they have better things to do with their autumnal Sundays, but because the Californian city happens to have a mayor with a backbone.

When the Raiders attempted to execute the disgusting shakedown that passes for ‘best practice’ in American pro sports, namely, “Give us untold millions of taxpayers’ money towards a new stadium or we’ll jump town,” Mayor Libby Schaaf asked if they needed help with their packing.

Six hundred miles to the east, alas, civic leaders are made of less formidable stuff. Nevada’s state legislature will donate $750m from civic coffers towards the $1.9bn price tag of the Raiders’ new stadium in Sin City. Hopefully those same leaders will now field calls all day long from voters wanting to know how the state’s generosity squares with Las Vegas’s current schools crisis, caused by – you guessed it – lack of funding.

Two fine articles have been penned here and here, highlighting other economic holes that traditionally riddle these sweetheart deals, like the discrepancy often found between predicted local revenues to be generated by the incoming team and the numbers that actually emerge (the Raiders new stadium will host only eight regular-season games, after all) and the ‘reverse Robin Hood’ scenario that sees public money used to generate profit for private investors.

And all this is before we disregard the financial aspect altogether and consider the simple aesthetics of these city-swaps. It can be hard enough maintaining affinity to a professional football club in Britain when its players change wholesale from one season to the next, yet imagine a league in which clubs themselves become migrants.

By way of analogy, I’d invite those of you with happy marriages, to visualise them having been subject to one small change at the outset – the words “’til death do us part” being replaced with “’til I get a better offer.”

With the best will in the world, I suspect the relationship that followed would have struggled to reach quite the same heights.

So you’ll have to excuse us, MK Dons supporters. It really is nothing personal, but we will never rule a line under the way in which your club came into being. Because we don’t want people getting ideas.

As America shows us, you see, franchise relocation is like smoking: it’s habit-forming and it usually stinks.